A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for the design, the engineering and the manufacturing of objects. CAD is an acronym for Computer-Aided Design, e.g. it relates to software solutions for designing an object. CAE is an acronym for Computer-Aided Engineering, e.g. it relates to software solutions for simulating the physical behavior of a future product. CAM is an acronym for Computer-Aided Manufacturing, e.g. it relates to software solutions for defining manufacturing processes and operations. In such computer-aided design systems, the graphical user interface plays an important role as regards the efficiency of the technique. These techniques may be embedded within Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems. PLM refers to a business strategy that helps companies to share product data, apply common processes, and leverage corporate knowledge for the development of products from conception to the end of their life, across the concept of extended enterprise.
The PLM solutions provided by Dassault Systèmes (under the trademarks CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA) provide an Engineering Hub, which organizes product engineering knowledge, a Manufacturing Hub, which manages manufacturing engineering knowledge, and an Enterprise Hub which enables enterprise integrations and connections into both the Engineering and Manufacturing Hubs. All together the system delivers an open object model linking products, processes, resources to enable dynamic, knowledge-based product creation and decision support that drives optimized product definition, manufacturing preparation, production and service.
CAD software can provide an authoring tool that is a software package that developers use to create and package content deliverable to end users. For instance, a designed object can be inserted (or transformed) into a document that is a technical illustration of the product that comprises the design object. The authoring tool thus allows to export and import a modeled object in a document, but it further allows the reviewer to enrich the modeled object by adding annotations. A typical example is the creation with the authoring tool of user guide (or manual) wherein the objects designed with the CAD application are represented in 2D or in 3D.
In CAD systems and authoring program, the user needs to perform measurements on the modeled objects. CAD systems provide different tools to make measurement or display a measurement of a product, e.g. measurements on a three-dimensional modeled product. A general definition of the term measurement is a value to assess a relationship between entities. For instance, a linear length is a measurement between two entities. As another example, an angle is a measurement between three entities.
A known method for performing a measurement is to select 1) a type of measure, 2) the entities involved in the measure, and 3) finally calculate the value of the measurement. For instance, the distance between two points on an object comprises: the user selection of a command of measuring a linear length between two points, a further selection of two points on the modeled object, and the displaying of the value representing the linear length between the two selected points. If the user needs to display a new measurement, he needs to perform all these steps again.
This method suffers several drawbacks. First, there is one command for each type of measurement. As a result, there are clearly too many commands and the user loses a lot of time searching for right command to use. A second problem is that the commands are represented on a menu that need to be displayed. This is particularly a problem on mobile devices (e.g. a tablet computer) as the commands are shown on an action bar that fills a non-negligible part of the graphical user interface (GUI): for instance, the modeled object(s) on the GUI is partially hidden. A third problem is that the user needs to call the action bar each time a command is selected: indeed, the action bar is in general hidden in order to free the GUI, e.g. for a complete view of the modeled object displayed in the GUI. Another issue is the mouse miles and the click number. For measuring a linear length as in the previous example, the user has to move the mouse to a dedicated part of the GUI to unhide the action bar, then he searches the command among the commands, then he moves the mouse over the good command, clicks on it, moves the mouse over a first point of the modeled object, selects this first point, then he moves the mouse on a second point of the modeled object, and selects it. A further problem is that each measurement is stored in a standalone way: it not possible to modify a measurement already stored, and it is not possible to reuse a part of (or the totality) a measure already use. This is problematic because the quantity of information stored on the database increases with the number of measures stored on it.
Within this context, there is still a need for an improved method for computing a measure between geometric elements of a modeled object. Preferably, the method decreases the user inputs for performing the measurement and the amount of space for storing a measure.